Gold dominated South Africa for a century. Hundreds of thousands of people from across Southern Africa laboured in the bowels of the earth to extract it, recruited through an extensive, highly organised and coercive migrant labour system. The economy was centred around gold and the large majority of the world’s gold was dug from South Africa.
It is hard to imagine South Africa’s recent history without gold, but soon we will not need the power of imagination. The gold industry is disappearing and today produces and employs a
fraction of what it did as recently as the 1980s. Within a generation, the industry may cease to exist entirely and this will have profound implications for the region.
My proposed project is a recent history of South Africa’s gold industry and the migrant labour system that accompanied it. There is an extensive literature on the rise of the gold industry and its dominance, yet its virtual demise has gone largely unremarked. During the fellowship, I will draft a book manuscript about the decline of gold in South Africa. What will it mean when there is no more gold?
